| Submitted by: Virginia Scott, Australia |
| Submission Date: 24 November 2005 |
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We know that we’ll have to line up to pay a government entrance fee of US$10 before we can enter this archaeological zone. A small crowd of touts and travel agents are waiting at the top of the path next to the ticket sellers. After paying our fee we walk straight past the little woman holding up a sign with our names on it. Apparently the guy at the desk of the Silver Swan in Mandalay has arranged a guesthouse for us but we want to find our own. I don’t feel too sorry for the little lady because the sigh reads ‘Mister Mark Scott and one Australian’. I guess that’s me.
We jump in one of the waiting taxis and leave behind the offending sign as we bounce along a bumpy rock-covered road towards Old Bagan. This is a small village with a lively market but we drive straight through on our way to Nyaung U. This is only five kilometers from Old Bagan and is another sleepy village with unpaved roads, palm tress and thatched huts. We’ve chosen the New Heaven Hotel out of the Lonely Planet and it looks a good choice. It’s set in a dirt laneway with trees and a sad little garden in front. The owner is enthusiastically helpful and we’re given a comfortable small room with our own bathroom and a balcony. After doing a bit of unpacking we sit on the balcony to make plans for the evening. Just around the corner is a street lined with cafes and art galleries so we head for here to have a drink and dinner. We don’t make it past the first café as the owners are almost begging us to come inside. It has a nice atmosphere and we stay for pizza and a vegetable salad and cups of hot tea which I spill all over my leg. Very painful but no real harm done.
We decide to go back to the room to get our duty free grog and end up at the Pwi Wa Restaurant for drinks. This is an open sided place with a thatched roof and tables inside and out. The tables outside are set up beside the ancient temple next door which tonight is covered with twinkling fairy lights - very beautiful under a starry sky. A small theatre is set up outside and we spend an hour watching the nightly marionette show. A great end to a relaxing day.
Friday - 9th January, 2004
Bagan
We both sleep well in our very quiet room and then eat breakfast in the sunny dining room set up in a pretty building near the laneway. It comes with the price of the room and the banana pancakes are a nice change.
There’s a couple of guys in the laneway with horse and carts so we arrange with a young driver to take us around the temples. His name is Ow Ow and he can speak English. Mark sits up front while I hop in the cart with our day packs. Our carriage is very handsome with a black leather roof and red leather seats and a pooh catcher for the horse. This is the only way to get around as the tracks into each temple are deep in sand and so no good for cars. It adds to the atmosphere anyway and keeps the area peaceful, as it should be.
We head out of Nyaung U (pronounced Nyow Oo) and soon ride into our first temple called Gubyaukgyi Paya. It’s behind an ancient brick wall and we climb the stone internal stairs to the top. The stairs are steep and so narrow that Mark’s shoulders are too wide and he has to go up almost sideways. We have wonderful views of the whole area and marvel at the amount of temples we can see. It’s much greener and lush than we’d imagined and we can see the Ayeyarwady River on one side and a range of mountains behind it in the distance. In the courtyard outside the temple are souvenir sellers with chickens running around amongst their gear. It’s a warm sunny morning and so good to feel at peace.
From here we visit two more temples that seem much the same and all with spectacular views from the top. At the third one we buy four temple paintings from two lovely men who are the artists themselves. The paintings are colourful reproductions of those found on the temple walls and will be great keepsakes of Myanmar. From here we visit the biggest and best-preserved temple of Bagan called Ananda Pahto. It’s still used by worshippers and the surrounding area is alive with markets and music. Ow Ow drives us around to the back gate and we walk barefoot along an open corridor to the entrance of the temple. Inside are a group of monks sitting around an elaborate coloured shrine and village people are having picnics on the floor. One of the monks is chanting while the rest are sitting around low, round wooden tables eating from scores of metal bowls. They seem very happy and friendly and it’s a cheery atmosphere.
In the middle of the temple are four standing buddhas facing outwards from the central cube. Each are 9.5 metres high and made of teak but are entirely covered with gold. We buy patches of gold leaf to stick to the statues but only Mark is allowed to apply it to one of the big buddhas. Because I’m a woman I can only apply it to the little Buddha sitting beneath – male supremacy reigns worldwide, it seems. Back outside we head off to another busy temple where I buy a cotton blouse from one of the ladies outside. She also shows me how the women make thanakha to paint on their faces. She takes a thin branch from the thanakha tree and rubs it on a whetstone with a few drops of water. The milky white sap forms a paste which she rubs on my face so I leave it on for the rest of the day. Mark buys a bag of peanuts before we set off for the village of Old Bagan.
We’d passed through here yesterday after we’d left the boat and it’s just as busy and colourful this morning. Music is coming from shacks all along both sides of the road as we clip clop our way through the village. Ow Ow shows us the Tharaba Gateway which is all that’s left of the wall that once surrounded the town and in the shade of trees close by are women selling watermelon and sugar cane. Nearby is an open-air café where we order a Bamar banquet for lunch. This sounds very exotic but we end up with a table full of very unappealing dishes. The fried chicken consists of a bowl of bones and the fish is a plateful of tiny whitebait, both cold and God only knows when it was cooked. We’re given an electric fan which we think is to keep us cool but it’s actually to keep the flies off the food. All the food is cold but apparently this is the traditional way. It’s cooked in the morning and then eaten later in the day. Don’t know if we get someone else’s leftovers but I suspect it’s the case. I eat virtually nothing while Mark eats up a storm. I swear he’d eat anything. I amuse myself by feeding a starving cat under the table. He likes the fish and I hope I’m not giving him food poisoning.
Now we head across the road to the huge outdoor market. There’s a kind of carnival atmosphere and we spend an hour wandering around. Untold stalls of dried fish and huge mounds of anchovette make it very smelly in some parts and we don’t fancy the flies crawling all over the cakes and sweets. The rest of it is fun and I buy a watermelon from one of the ladies sitting near the Tharaba Gateway.
We’re ready for a break so Ow Ow now takes us back to the New Heaven. We have drinks on our little terrace then walk down to the village. At the Pwi Wa Restaurant we order chips and chicken salad for a late lunch and book traditional Burmese massages at a shack near the hotel. Rest and read in our room till the late afternoon then down the street to have our massages. Two young ladies are waiting and Mark and I lie on thin mattresses on the wooden floor. It’s so basically wonderful in here. The walls are woven bamboo and we can smell the combination of burning incense and mosquito coils.
It’s almost dark by the time we leave so we head back to our room for a quick shower. Back again to the village, we now turn right for a change and find an Italian restaurant playing Santana and some very atmospheric Italian music. There’s a full moon so we sit outside and eat pizza and tomato salad and drink Bacardi rum with fresh pineapple juice. Very romantic and we get a bit silly before an early night.
Saturday - 10th January, 2004
Bagan
Breakfast is banana pancakes again and this morning we chat with a young German girl. She’s an expert on everything and a bit of a pain. We’ve just found out the bad news that we can’t use credit cards or traveller’s cheques in Myanmar so Mark does a few quick calculations and realises we won’t have enough American dollars to get us to the end of our holiday. The hotel owner is incredibly helpful and we get him to ring MAI to get us on an earlier flight back to Bangkok. The only flight we can get is one day before our scheduled one but it’ll have to do. We’ll just have to do everything on the cheap. We start to make plans to change our itinerary when I redo the calcs and we’ve got heaps more than we thought. For once my baby was wrong and we’re both happy that he was. Now we can fly from Lake Inle back to Yangon to save us the apparently hellish twenty hour bus ride. We book the flight now and also arrange to have a van drive us to Kalaw tomorrow.
Feeling very relieved, we hire bikes from the hotel and set off for a day around Bagan. Mark is a good rider but I’m scared and hopeless. Still determined, though, we head for the Post Office. This is out on the main road but there’s virtually no traffic so it should be a breeze. I don’t appear to have any control over the bike and always seem to be screaming at near misses with the gutter. The Post Office is hard to find because it’s not what we expect it to look like. It’s set behind a high wall in a very tropical area and the building is very grand and beautiful. I just miss a few stray dogs lounging around the door and then make an easy phone call home.
Back near the hotel we stop at a café for drinks then head off to the Shwezigon Paya. Across a wide dirt patch of ground I unceremoniously fall off my bike but no damage done. Leaving the bikes outside we look at the souvenir stalls along the long walkway to the paya and buy a copy of George Orwell’s classic, ’’Burmese Days”. Inside is the usual small payas and ceremonial halls all built around the central golden chedi. A young girl wearing a faceful of thanakha latches onto us and becomes our guide. She walks us around the compound and I buy gold leaf to put on a tiny Buddha statue inside a sort of low cave. She takes us to see the nats and we give her a donation as we leave.
Outside, souvenir sellers are waiting for us and as I’d promised to buy something on the way out we barter for a bronze elephant. They want too much and we don’t really care if we get it anyway so we leave. They chase us out to the bikes and we settle for a price that we’re happy with. Across from the paya on the main road is a string of cafes so we stop at the Nation Cafe for fresh pineapple juice and noodles. From here we ride out to a monastery where we’re hoping to arrange a meditation for tonight. It’s a barren dusty place with lots of scrawny dogs hanging around. I’m scared they’ll chase the bikes so we get off and walk. In an open pavilion a group of monks are chanting but no-one comes near us so we think we’ve got the wrong place.
On the bikes again we ride towards Shwezigon Paya and finally find the right monastery. It’s called Aung Myi Bodhi Dhamma Yeiktha or the Meditation Monastery and it’s beautiful. Past another pavilion of chanting monks we meet the actual meditation monk himself. He’s a tall thin man of about thirty and has the usual calm countenance of all Buddhist monks. He’s obviously totally relaxed as he cheerfully farts the whole time. He’s happy to show us around and takes us to a couple of prayer halls and then to visit his mother. Her name is Dhamma Nandi and she’s a nun at the monastery. She lives in a bamboo shack behind the monks’ quarters and shares with a group of young people who are here to study for a few months. We climb up onto the bamboo platform raised a few feet off the dirt floor and our meditation monk makes us green tea and offers us biscuits and cigarettes. Surprisingly he smokes a packet a day. He wants us to take photos of the students and his mother but Dhamma Nandi is far from happy. She obviously doesn’t want her picture taken and is muttering under her breath. |
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